It has been 22 days 18 hours and 7 minutes since my iPhone was stolen. That’s just over three weeks since I was wrenched from connectivity and plunged into the isolation of a technological abyss.
I feel like a part of me is missing. Like I’m suspended in a helix of unreality. My subconscious mind still waits to hear my personal theme song ‘Defying Gravity’ ring out to alert me someone is calling. I still reach for the iPhone to check the day’s weather before I get dressed in the morning; to check the traffic to decide which route I’m going to take, or to Shazaam a song I like when I hear it playing in the car or a shopping centre or pub, cafe, restaurant, etc, only to be cursed with that sinking feeling when I remember it’s gone.
I have become intolerably fidgety in waiting rooms and queues because I don’t have Bejewelled or Wordsmith (or any of the other games apps) in my pocket anymore. I have no idea where anyone is or what they doing/thinking/feeling because I don’t have mobile access to Facebook ― nor can I share where I am by ‘checking in’ or provide commentary on, well, anything at all!
I’ve been lost for the first time in years because I don’t have the GPS in my pocket anymore. You may suggest I read a hardcopy map, but who can fit paper maps for random locations in their pockets, just in case? It’s the same with public transport timetables, instead of inputting my destination and the time I want to get there into an app to get the bus number and bus stop location ― I now have to ask someone! Crazy.
And music! I don’t own a CD player or speakers, just earbuds and an iPhone dock. My 27 playlists lay dormant in the guts of my computer waiting patiently until it is synced with a replacement device. The auxiliary cord, still plugged into the 12 volt in the car hangs forlornly, waiting… I can’t bring myself to pull it out, it just seems so final.
The video of one of my staffies flipping the cat up into the air only to land on the other, is forever lost because I didn’t sync the phone for a few weeks before it was stolen. Same with the last photos I took of my daughter before she moved overseas to live. Gone.
I don’t know what’s going on in the world without my newsfeeds. I can’t tweet. Or email. Or blog. Wherever I am and whatever I’m doing, I have to wait until I get home and then tune in to old technology like TV and the computer, before I can place myself back into my comfort zone―a broader social and political global context.
I ask myself when I became so reliant on a small flat piece of plastic. The grief is palpable. Many people I know are just as connected and reliant on their smart phones, increasingly so. I suppose this is why the device has gained such currency as to warrant leeching low-lives to steal them by whichever means they can.
It is an affliction of modern society, of city society, that individuals thrive on the immediacy of connectedness to maintain their networks ― social and professional. And it is left only to those existing on society’s fringes as criminals and bludgers, to attempt to subvert this.
Like social media as the lifeblood of modern society, so are the applications on our smartphones…. *sigh…
City Observationist 